Individual

Character's full name: Johnny Ali Oblivion
Alias/ Nickname/ Code name: Temper, Prometheus Jones, Dante
Gender: Male
Age: 25
Date of Birth: July 14, 1988
Birthplace/ Home/ Place of origin: New Orleans, Louisiana.
Nationality: American
Ethnicity/ Cultural Heritage: American Smoothie (a white blend with bits of everything thrown in)

Appearance

Hair color and style: He’s got short blonde hair that he always keeps in perfect shape. No real style, just whatever he can do.
Skin Tone: Tanned via the sun. No spray-tan Oompa Loompa skin for this guy!
Eye Color: Pale blue.
Height: 6’3.
Build: Muscular in the gracefully toned dancer’s build.
Visible mutation: None. Bad for an image, you know?
Scars/ Tattoos/ Piercings: Oh no, none of those. No, he’s completely natural and without a mark on him.
Other features: He’s got an eight-pack. A nice eight-pack, if he does say so himself. He's also looks quite mature for his age, but in the "prime of his life" kind of way and not the "old geezer" look.

Everyday clothing style: Varies. He’s just as fond of dressing up as he is of dressing down.
Uniform: Varies.
Sleepwear: Pff. As if.
Miscellaneous clothing: He always carries around an assortment of candles, lighters, matches, and sometimes cigarettes (he doesn’t smoke, but they’re great for containing a flame).

Character

Personality: Johnny behaves like a fire. He hates boundaries and always seeks to push the envelope. He’s very touchy and doesn’t seem to have any clue as to what this “personal space” stuff is all about. He has no modesty (a necessity for his night job) and thinks nothing about getting too close to other people, even if he hasn’t even met them yet. This extends into a rampant curiosity that causes him to constantly poke his nose into everything, whether it has anything to do with him or not. He likes to know everything about everyone.

Johnny can be rather impulsive. He lives much of life by the seat of the pants. Sure, he can think things through, but he leaves that to the boring stuff, like paying taxes and bills. Everything else? Just wing it and see what happens!

He’s a very passionate person; he tends to run to extremes, nearly diva-like. He has spectacular romances, intense love, unwavering loyalty, blazing anger, and torrential sorrow. He tries to find the humor in every situation, preferring to laugh at the world instead of becoming tied down by it: he hates being told what to do or forced into something, even if it’s by social standards. His main goal in life is to have fun, no matter what.

Because of this, he’s not a very insightful person. He’s not somebody you want to tell all your deepest fears and secrets to--he’d only use them as prime gossip--but he’s good for a laugh or just being in an easy atmosphere. He’s not really shallow, he just doesn’t like to be weighed down by other people’s problems. As a result, he doesn’t tell anyone his problems, either. He prefers to make everyone believe that he’s living the life and nothin’s gonna bring him down.

He just adores being the center of attention.

Johnny loves adrenaline and thrill-seeking, no matter what form this comes in. Skydiving? Fist-fighting? A tricky dance move? Verbal debates/screaming contests? Sweet! He loves a good challenge and has a difficult time understanding the concept of knowing when to back down. It’s rarely because of stubbornness: it’s just an insatiable curiosity as to what’s going to happen if he says one more thing about the guy’s mother....

Hobbies/ Interests:

• Fire. All kinds of it.
• Dancing.
• Running.
• Picking up a new language.
• Flirting.
• Reading.
• Long walks on the beach.
• Humor.
• The color red.
• Showing off.
• Swing music.
• Old romantic movies.
• A good love story.
• Getting a date.

Job or part time job and description: One job isn’t good enough for Johnny Ali Oblivion. He’s so amazing he has to have two to satisfy him.
Job Number 1: Nightclub Performer. He’ll sing, he’ll dance, he’ll even play a classic instrument. Or other things. Just don’t ask him to do stand-up comedy.
Job Number 2: Volunteer Firefighter. This involves Johnny running into burning buildings and putting out the fires while rescuing people and such. Piece of cake. And great job benefits.
Fears/ phobias/ concerns:

• Lots of water. Because when there’s water, there’s no fire.
• Huge thunderstorms
• The dark

Special talents:

• Polyglot. He’s fluent in English, Spanish, French (including Louisiana and Haitian Creole), and Russian. He’s adequate in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and Mandarin. He has some understanding of Braille and American Sign Language.
• Pretty good with savate, French kickboxing.
• Has Romeo and Juliet completely memorized.
• He’s a decent percussionist, but excels at the violin and piano.
• Can tie a cherry stem into a knot with his tongue.
• Fire-dancing.
• Can read and write backwards.
• A trained tenor.
• Contortionist. Able to bend and flex himself into some surprising and interesting positions.
• Knows CPR. That’s the one where you kiss strangers, right?
• Capable of picking simple locks with a paperclip and a wish.
• Pretty good at sword swallowing.
• Superb with a grill.
• Plays the harmonica with moderate proficiency.
• Can hold his breath for four minutes.

Morality

Good/ bad/ neutral/ other: Oh, Johnny is baaad, but often in a good way. Really though, he’s closer to being neutral, because all of his actions tend to cancel each other out. Like, making stuff for a bake auction for a nursing home negates accidentally pushing someone against the knife in your hand, right?

Mutations

Mutation description:
Fire Communion / Pyro-Symbiosis

Perhaps you’ve heard of pyrokinesis, the ability to manipulate fire with one’s mind. You could say that’s what Johnny does. But that’s like saying Beethoven just pressed a few keys on a piano. Johnny’s particular mutation is much more....intimate.

Johnny’s mind is not all there. In the absence of fire, he’s....stunted. He feels very few emotions and walks around like a zombie. He doesn’t get really happy, but neither does he generally experience anger or sadness or much of anything else. He’s fairly apathetic, has limited imaginative capabilities, and has no desires to do anything. He has no motivation. While he still possesses all of his memories and knowledge, complex reasoning and logic is usually beyond him. There’s not much to him.

But in the presence of fire, Johnny’s mind spreads out and joins with the flames, becoming one with them, up to a standard radius of twenty-five feet. Johnny regains his ability to reason at a complex level, as well as the ability to feel emotions. Fire serves as his subconsciousness. It influences his emotions and thoughts and instincts. It’s in his head, guiding and helping him.

Due to the fire serving as his subconsciousness, any flame within range is liable to act upon any wish or desire of his, whether he intends it to or not. When acting without his direction, fire tends to be restricted to merely moving about and/or changing shapes and sizes. During the ghost story portion of a camping adventure, the campfire might morph into a fiery phantom or decide to start spazzing about in a non-existent windstorm. But it will not become a miniature fireworks show that spells out cool words and such.

Fire is very reactive to even his mood; strong emotions might cause flames to dramatically grow while the reverse is true for subdued feelings. He can manipulate fire with conscious intent, but it always seems somewhat sentient as it is always under the influence of his mind and essentially becomes an extension of his mentality.

There does seem to be a limit to the amount of fire Johnny can control. If you gave a mouse a cookie and it spontaneously combusted and instantly filled a standard ten by ten by ten foot room with fire and nothing else, that’s how much fire Johnny can control at a time. He just can’t seem to wrap his head around any more. If there’s more fire than that within his comfortable control area, then he’s limited to only the fire closest to him. If he grew a flame until it managed to reach that amount of fire, he’d lose control over the excess bits and those parts would die unless they could catch on to something else. Extinguishing or shrinking flames follow the same line of logic. In this way, he can make a fire bigger than he control it, but once bits of it start escaping his limits, it must succumb to laws of nature and physics just like any other fire. He can still sense it as long as it’s in his range, but he loses all control over it, conscious or otherwise.

Essentially, fire is like a kid to Johnny. A single kid? No problemo. Sure they might be wild and try to run everywhere or eat anything, but you can totally handle them. Same thing if you had two or three more. But it would be quite difficult to maintain that same level of control over thirty brats with the same mannerisms. You’d be stuck with trying to control as many as possible in order to limit the damage done. But back to the one child. Even if you could control it for years and years and years, one day it’s going to grow up and become a teenager. You will still have some control, but you can’t control everything about it’s life. It’s beginning to exceed your boundaries. And once it becomes an adult and leaves your reach? Well, then you have to let it go and let it make its own way in the world.

That was a strange metaphor.

As a result of being in Johnny’s mind, sometimes fire shows reflections of Johnny’s innermost thoughts. It sometimes serves as his conscience, or the angel and devil on his shoulders. He might see images of people in the flames, or perhaps alternative courses of actions. The fire might appear to dance around and engulf a room if Johnny is angry or such, but in these cases, it’s never more than an illusion. Essentially, Johnny may see things in fire that isn’t really there. It’s only there for him.

He also hears voices coming from the flames. Turns out, fire is good for advice, whether you want it or not. It’s all pretty trippy at times, like that one scene from Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame, when the minister guy sees Esmeralda in the fire and dances with spirits.

The mental effects of fire decrease the further from it he is and the smaller the fire. A candle in his hand is all he really needs to function at a normal level. At twenty-five feet away, that candle needs to be a tiki torch. Also, the more fire he’s around, the more brash and impulsive and emotion-driven he tends to be.

Johnny can also cause fire to exist without any physical source of fuel by feeding it his own psychic energy. Though he cannot create a flame with his mind, he can, for instance, allow a candle’s flame to leave the wick and travel independently through the air. This process can lead to migraines if used too often, too long, or on too much fire. A candle’s flame can be sustained indefinitely without anything more than a slight pressure around his temples, but a minivan-sized inferno or twenty flaming basketballs can give him a major headache within fifteen minutes.

While mentally sustaining fire, Johnny can alter it in any way he chooses. He can enlarge it or extinguish parts of it, as well as changing its shape and moving it around. He can also enable it to burn hotter or cooler. However, the hotter or larger he makes the fire, the harder it is to fuel it, leading to the migraines mentioned just a moment ago.

Although he is not immune to fire, Johnny is still protected from it. Rather than inflicting harm upon its master and friend, fire tends to extinguish itself a millimeter before touching his skin. Strangely enough, Johnny cannot feel the heat of a fire, although he is aware of it through his connection with it. he can, however, still get a sunburn or feel the heat from a non-flaming source. Nobody knows how this is so.

Johnny is intimately aware of all sources of fire within a fifty foot radius. He immediately connects with them and gains an intuitive understanding of how large or small they are, how hot they are, whether they’re expanding or dying, where the fire is, and even a vague idea of whatever they’re touching. If he stood beside a house on fire, he could tell you exactly what parts of the house were on fire, what things were burning, the temperature (in Celsius or Fahrenheit), and the status of the fire.

Strengths:

• Fireproof-- Temper cannot be harmed by flames. Fire cannot come within a millimeter of his skin and he’s immune to its heat. Fire automatically extinguishes whatever parts of it that Temper’s skin may pass through.
• Only You Can Stop Forest Fires-- Temper can do anything with a flame. He can change its size, shape, temperature, and even extinguish it if he wants.
• Fyre, Fyre, Burning Bright-- Johnny can extract fire from its fuel source and sustain it with his own mental energy, enabling it to never burn out for as long as he concentrates.
• Fire On The Brain-- Part of Temper’s mind exists only in fire. So while he’s just as susceptible to psychic manipulations as anyone else, don’t try to break into his noggin. You will be burned, for Johnny’s psyche is imbued with the flames he’s connected with. Temper’s head can handle it. Can yours?
• The Voices In My Head-- He hears voices in his head from fire, often making it much easier to understand his internal feelings and desires. And what better excuse to use to get by with anything than by blaming it on the voices in your head?
  

Weaknesses and Limitations:

• Think Inside The Box-- Temper’s range only extends up to twenty-five feet from his head. He has no influence or awareness of fire beyond that point. Any sustained fire automatically extinguishes itself beyond that point and any fires return to their natural states.
• Go Play With Matches-- Temper can’t start a fire; he can only manipulate what’s already there. This means he must always be able to start a fire or bring fire with him wherever he goes, unless he actually wants to be numb in the head.
• The Fire’s Gone Out--When he’s not in the presence of fire, Johnny acts like he’s drugged. He doesn’t really feel anything, barely reacts, and has impaired thinking abilities.
• Hot-Headed--The amount of fire Temper is near has a direct correlation to how emotional he gets. If he stands in a bonfire, don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry and standing in a bonfire. Things start to burn.
• Burn Baby Burn-- Although immune to the effects of fire and its heat, Temper can still be harmed by other sources of heat, such as from electricity or sunlight.
• My Achy-Breaky Head-Achy-- Extended fire manipulation can bring about some major migraines, as well as general exhaustion. It’s not so bad when doing a few tricks with regular fire, but sustained fires are much, much more harder to keep up. The more fire he tries to sustain and control, the quicker he will tire and his migraines will come. If he reaches his limit, he can black out or even be unable to connect with any flame for up to twenty-four hours. Or possibly brain damage. He doesn’t like exploring the limits of his powers.
• Total Firebug-- Due to the manifestation of his subconsciousness in fire, fire tends to act out on the slightest whims of Temper. It can be really hard to control those whims, so sometimes things around him just catch on fire and burn before Temper can stop them. Also, fire has a tendency to lean towards Temper, so you may wanna keep the rugs away from the fireplace when he comes visiting.
• Disco Inferno-- Johnny can only manipulate an equivalent amount of fire to the space of a 10x10x10 foot room. If fires manage to grow beyond this limit, Johnny will not be able to control the runoff flames, although he can still sense them as long as they’re within range. Excess fire becomes normal fire and can no longer be manipulated in any way at all.

Physical Abilities

General Physical Capabilities: Johnny is in excellent physical condition. He regularly works out each day, for both his volunteer work and to keep in shape for dancing. He also has dance practice at least once a day, keeping his strong, limber, and agile. He’s a man with all the strength, speed, reflexes, and stamina of a man who constantly works out such as he does, but his natural ability to contort puts him far above almost everyone else when it comes to flexibility.
Fighting Style: Seductive tactics. Failing that, he resorts to much less interesting methods. Although he has some savate training, Temper often does whatever he feels like in the moment. He likes using available improv weapons as well as mixing things up with demonic creatures made from fire. Just for kicks and giggles.
Fighting Style Pros/Cons: Fire can be pretty scary. So can projectile chairs and bottles. And swift kicks to the head. The only downfall to his style is that he can get carried away with showing off and easily leave himself open to assault. As for his seduction techniques, they only fail on occasion, and that’s almost always against lesbians or homophobic men. But when they do work, he’s in for a *fade to black*

History Of Your Character

Johnny used to live in a bayou just outside of New Orleans, surrounding by the Oblivion clan. Having been in the family for generations, ever since Eli Oblivion first came to America in 1772, the bayou had a naturally homey feeling to it. Johnny grew up with his massive family, as it seemed that nobody ever really left the bayou, but if they did, someone married someone from far away and kept up the count.

The family had always been open-minded and welcoming. Aunt Rebecca, Cousin Moctezuma, and Uncle Li had all married people from foreign countries. In the family, there were three practicing Sunni Muslims, a lapsed Catholic, four Southern Baptists, a Buddhist, seven atheists, one converted Jew, two agnostics, and a Wiccan, to name a few. One cousin had been out of the closet ever since he was sixteen, but another cousin was still unconfirmed. About half of the various family members had some kind of mutation, but only eighty percent of those had the X-Gene. Of those, about six had very obvious mutations. Johnny’s mom, Julia, was admittedly a bit strange because while she was totally human, she could cancel out other powers. Kinda cool, actually.

But nobody cared about any of that. All were welcomed. All were loved.

Freshman year of high school, Johnny’s mutation manifested. It was in some science class. Usually, Johnny did pretty well in all of his subjects, but he absolutely adored science. (This could have been early signs of his abilities.) He was mid-way through a very complicated procedure when suddenly the Bunsen burner started looking funny. The flame seemed to be forming a barely visible serpent twisting in the air. That was pretty cool! He began playing with the flame until the lab was over. Then off went the burner and Johnny lost his mind.

After that, Johnny went a few days of being completely unable to properly function. His teachers thought he was on drugs, but the tests came back clean. To make a longish story slightly shortish, everyone discovered that Johnny was a perfectly normal boy who just had special needs. As long as he was permitted to keep a small flame with him at all times, he was just fine. He only ever burnt three homework assignments and one bully. They all deserved it.

When Johnny graduated from high school, he went off to join the circus. Why not? College wasn’t really a thing for him; he tended to gravitate toward more hands-on stuff. Not that he really ever had to worry about a career if he ever really needed one--his family owned a construction company, a well-loved local restaurant, a bar, and had a lot of influence in one of the Wal-Marts there. Worst come to worst, he could always get a job from Cousin Brady, whose business was often conducted in darkened rooms and secluded areas and wasn’t always legal.

While at the circus, Johnny really opened up. He learned that he loved showing off to others and being the source of all attention. It was there that he learned the tricks of sword swallowing, enhancing his natural contorting abilities, and his Oriental languages and Russian (the circus was even more multicultural than his family!). However, his main tricks were all related to fire. Fire dancing, blowing fire, and even the use of fire poi were his specialties. Of course, only the other circus performers were aware that Johnny augmented his talents with his mutation, enabling him to perform fantastic ballets with women made of flames, or to fend off fiery dragons with burning whips. Stuff like that. He was very flashy and crowds loved him.

Then Katrina took New Orleans by storm. The phone call that followed was devastating. It seemed his family’s bayou had been torn asunder. It seemed that not even Grandpa Chil’s weather manipulation or Grandma Jo’s precognitive prowess had been enough to save them from Katrina’s wrath. Yes, their abilities had been growing weaker and weaker as they aged (they were both over eighty!) but still! Only Aunt Linda had managed to survive, and only then because of her power to merge with water.

Just like that, the Oblivion clan had nearly lived up to its name.

Desolated, Johnny decided that he needed to move somewhere else. He needed a new change of scenery and the circus would only remind him of where he was the day he got that phone call. After a tearful reunion with the remaining Oblivions, Johnny parted ways with a new destination in mind, unlike anything he’d ever seen: New York City. Far north, no manners, fast-paced, and with a great nightlife? It would be the last thing to ever remind Johnny of his family.

And that’s where he’s been for the last several years.

Roleplay
Where did you learn about this site?: A Google search for something, I think, at least a century ago.
Do you have any other characters on MRO, if so who: Liz! Liz Sundance! Well, Elizabeth, really, but that can get confusing. What with that other one running around and all.
Sample RP:

Johnny had to admit it: he looked great in a firefighter outfit! Sometimes he’d catch himself stopping in front of a mirror to check himself out, but he couldn’t deny it. The job was very well becoming to him, especially with the extra workouts he’d been doing lately. That is, when he wasn’t at one of his other practices and such for his night job.

Oh, yeah, he was actually still on his day job. Funny, sometimes it was just so easy to get lost in a daydream when inside a burning building.

“Move it, Oblivion!” barked one of his comrades in similar, fetching gear.

Johnny replied, “Okay, okay, I’m on it. I’ll take the next floor!” He carefully sprinted up the solid-enough staircase to reach his new destination. “Anyone here?” he shouted. Maybe he’d get lucky and someone would yell “No.” Maybe then he could leave. Wait wait wait. That wasn’t how it worked. Aagh! Too much fire.

“Let’s calm down a bit, fellows,” Johnny informed the spectres of fire that were attempting to breach the hall. He could feel one of the rooms to his left almost in its entirety, a sure sign that the room was consumed by flames. “Anyone in there?” he asked aloud, not even caring if it was pointless.

”Noooo,” responded the fire. It was true--Johnny couldn’t feel any flesh beneath the fire. Flesh and bone always had that particular, delicious hamburger texture to it when it was on fire.

But enough was enough. He might as well do his job. “Okay now. Cut it out, you’ve had your fun. Say good-bye to the others!” he said with a smile, waving at the fire on the other side of the door. Then as he slowly lowered his hand, the fire in that room began to burn out, complaining all the way about how unfair it was that it had to go first while the others bits of fire in the house got to keep playing. “Shhh shh shh,” Temper cooed until that room’s inferno had died.

Now he needed to move on. To the next room!

This one wasn’t covered in fire so he actually had to open the door. Luckily enough it wasn’t locked or barred so he could easily open it. “Hello? Anyone here?” he yelled. Goodness, why was he needing to yell? Right! The fire was just too loud! As far as he could sense, the fire was whispering and shouting and bantering back and forth, jubilant to be free and allowed to roam as much as possible! But it was annoying.

With a huff, Johnny cut all the fire on that floor to mere campfires, immediately reducing the noise to a level similar to that of a high school cafeteria. Much better. “Okay, one more time. Anybody there?” he said in a much more polite tone of voice. There was a muffled response from somewhere against the far wall. It was a little hard to see through the smoke, but was that a person? Could be. “I’m coming in!” he cried.

He stepped into the room and quickly made his way over to the person. It was a woman with blonde hair and nice assets, cowering in a corner. Smart, kind of. There really hadn’t been a way out of the room in hindsight. There had been flames blocking the door but Johnny had accidentally completely extinguished them when he walked through them. He’d have to apologize to them later for his rudeness.

“Well, come on. What say you we blow this joint?” he queried jovially as he crouched by her. All he got from her was a sobbing expression and a weak blessing to Jesus. “I’ll take that as a yes. Now, can you walk, or do you need me to carry you?” Please let me carry you, please please please! The woman coughed violently and grabbed his shoulder. “I think I can--” another cough interrupted her and she collapsed against the wall. Okay, not good.

“Here, I’ve got you,” Johnny so gallantly said as he moved in to scoop her up in his arms. No fireman’s carry for her! Not with that kind of body! She obliged him by wrapping her arms around his neck and dissolving into tears. Clearly she was overwhelmed by her angelic savior.

As Johnny exited the room and headed for the stairs, he paused for a moment in realization. “Heh, I’ve left all the lights on! And somebody probably left the stove light on, too. How silly!” he said, grinning at his rescuee. As he marched down the steps, he extinguished all the flames on that floor. The woman in his arms looked up at him with an expression of wariness, confusion, and maybe a smidgen of fear total love.

Yep. He was right. He did look good in that uniform.

Congrats on getting accepted!

Because everyone loves a mutant who hears voices in their head <3

Ooh la la, a firefighter~ I'm not quite sure how well our characters would get along, but congratulations on being accepted!

Grats on the second Liz!*Hugs the roomie!*

Fire mentality. Interesting take on a basic mutation. Cant wait to read your RP's to see what its like.

Congrats on getting accepted

Sweeeeeeeeeeeet.

Enough said.

Kudos on the second, Mr. Liz! Very cool take on typical firemancer. I'll be interested to see how this guy plays out. <3